The Biographer's Lover

by Ruby J Murray

  My son Immy was born just before the biography was released. As Edna’s fame grew and the book began to sell faster and faster, I would take Immy to events, setting him down in his carrier in the corner of the room, or later at the edge of the stage. Once, at a panel at the State Library in Melbourne, I saw Leslie staring down into his carrier, as if she was trying to work out where he came from. She disappeared into the crowd before I could get back to him.

  They had been close, Edna and Leslie, towards the end. There are drawings of Leslie in some of Edna’s last sketchbooks. Leslie sitting on a bench in Sorrento, looking into the distance as the ferry pulls away. Leslie asleep at the desk in Edna’s studio, her mouth partly open, head resting on her arms.

  I have often wondered how much Edna told Leslie, and how much Leslie read without permission. She had access to Edna’s papers. In the years before they were moved to the National Gallery of Australia, Leslie kept the boxes in her own storage unit. She could have snuck into them, gone rifling through her friend’s life.

  Mostly, though, I wonder what Edna would think of us. Of me.

  Before cancer got Anna-Marie, I told her what we’d done, Percy and I. She was bald that day, surrounded by blooming and wilting flowers, all of them with sharp little calling cards wedged into their petals. Her room smelled strongly of disinfectant, bodies and plants slowly going bad.

  ‘You think I can help you now?’ she said, twitching in her bed. ‘That book made your career, and one day it’s going to bring it all down again. I told you not to get so involved with that damned family.’

  After the visit, I sat for a long time in the drought-scorched Treasury Gardens, staring up at the window of the room where I thought Anna-Marie lay.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  Edna Frances Whitedale was born on 24 October 1929 into the westerly backblocks of Geelong, an industrial town of wool princes and workers, superphosphate and factories. As a child, she lay under the clacking Jacquard looms of the Black Swan Carpets factory, watching the coloured threads spin through the shuttles, weaving tight, intricate patterns for the upper-class families of Geelong and beyond.

  She was the second and final child of Margaret and Frank Whitedale, a family struggling on the edge of the working class. Both Margaret and Frank were cogs in the wheels of the town’s industrial wool empire. Her father, known in the town as the responsible family man in an otherwise ‘bad’ Whitedale bunch, was the factory floor manager at Black Swan Carpets. Edna’s mother, Frank’s French ‘war bride’, worked as a secretary in the factory’s office.

  By 1929, Edna was long-awaited. Over the ten years that had passed since Margaret gave birth to Edna’s older sister Imelda, Margaret had endured a number of miscarriages. For her, the loss of each child was momentous. She was trying to belong, trying to prove her worth to her husband’s demanding family in an Australia that would soon be calling for its citizens to ‘populate or perish’. The government’s slogan was apt: it was indeed a dangerous time to be a mother. Birth was a treacherous business, with maternal deaths on the rise in the 1920s and 1930s. More and more women were being treated in hospitals and put under the care of doctors who, as often as not, knew less about birth than the women themselves. But the Whitedales were desperate, and they scrimped and saved for Margaret to get a bed in the newly opened maternal wing of the Geelong Kitchener Memorial Hospital.

  Edna herself would probably not have approved of anyone reading too much significance into her date of birth. The keen eye she shows in her work suggests that she did not break time up into discrete packages: she saw events as playing out over years, in memory, in repeat. The social position that defined her family did not begin with her birth. It had been building for decades. But it’s a fact that Edna was born on the eve of a crisis, and in hindsight the coincidence is at risk of seeming poetic. The American economy was faltering – in days it would collapse. The rest of the world would be dragged down with it.

  In Geelong, the Whitedales were distracted. For them, Edna was a miracle child, and she took up all the air in the room. Even as Australia endured the Great Depression that defined her childhood, Edna spent her earliest years feeling that she was protected, special; her older sister, Imelda, would make sure she was both.

  The Biographer

  On the day I first went to visit Edna’s studio and met her widower, Max, great gusts of late autumn clouds blew over the highway. The drive from the city to the seaside resort town of Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula follows a thin string of empty beaches that unfurl towards the craggy rocks of the point. The Ford Falcon roared under me. Hard rain spattered on its windshield. I listened to the endless talk of dingoes and babies on the radio and kept one hand pressed over the heat vent.

  Edna Cranmer grew up on my peninsula, on the Bellarine, with its pockmarked marshes and factories, bays within bays, the smell of sewerage, salt, smelters, sheep, woodchips and bird shit. But she grew old on the Mornington side of the bay: a straight coastal road skirting the water lined with stately white limestone hotels.

  Now I can see they are both beautiful peninsulas, even stripped of their she-oak forests and bushlands. But back then, I liked to think that their names revealed the character of their residents: on my side, the Bellarine still held the faint echo of the past, for all we tried to ignore it. Balla Wein, from the Wadawurrung. Where we lean on our elbow (balla) beside the fire (wein), looking out at the sparkling sea.

  The Mornington Peninsula had been named after some fancy colonial earl.

  That day I wound through the narrow streets above Sorrento in the rain, checking the numbers on the letterboxes. Infinity pools dappled with raindrops flickered between the houses. Inching down Max Cranmer’s driveway, I thought the Falcon would lose its grip on the slick paving stones and plunge towards the cliffs.

  Victoria was supposed to meet me there. The only other car in the steep driveway was a shiny silver BMW. I peered through its window, but it wasn’t her car; the metal drive shaft had been modified, and a disabled permit swung from the rear-view mirror.

  I paused on the dark verandah, gathering myself. A well-oiled axe was propped against a neatly stacked pile of wood.

  Edna’s widower opened the door before I had time to knock. Max Cranmer was bent over, a question mark silhouetted against the soft green light that poured out of the house, a light I would later recognise in Edna’s work from the late 1970s and early 1980s. I put out my hand automatically to shake his. Then I registered that he couldn’t – saw the polished-wood walking sticks he was using to support himself, his crippled legs.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, pinwheeling his fingers around the silky handles of the walking sticks. ‘Old wounds. You lead the way to the car, I’ll give the directions.’

  ‘Edna’s studio isn’t here?’

  ‘Up the road a few blocks. She wanted the feeling of being out of the house. The walk.’

  ‘Should we wait for Victoria?’

  ‘Nah, it’s fine, it’s fine. I’ll come with you. Vicky called. She missed the Queenscliff ferry. It’s Sunday, so the next one won’t be for a few hours. We wait for her and we’ll be here all day. And I have a meeting at two. Can’t do that.’

  I heard his sticks hitting the paving stones as we went back to the Falcon. I opened the passenger door for him as if I was a taxi driver.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he said, running his dark eyes over the car admiringly.

  ‘My dad worked for Ford,’ I said, which wasn’t an explanation.

  ‘Eddy painted a picture of a ceremony at Ford in the ’50s,’ Max said. ‘It was an okay one, that painting. Think she sold it to the factory owner.’

  He leaned against the Falcon’s roof, lowering himself in stages into the passenger seat, then pulling the rest of his body along. As I reversed up the steep drive he touched the car’s upholstery, admired its finishes. Told me I’d taken good care of it.

  I had. The Falcon was my folly. I’d bought it on the day I finished high school, when I w
as eighteen. Years after Dad died. Bright red and chrome power, snub-nosed with tiny headlights, it had eaten up all the money he left me in his will. My mother had been furious, but I hadn’t cared. My ex-husband, Joe, had wanted me to sell it, but I had refused. Since the divorce, the Falcon had spent most of its time parked in the street outside my narrow Carlton bluestone. My escape vehicle, gathering grime. Every now and then a note would show up on its windshield, asking if it was for sale. It was not. I needed it, even if I hardly drove it.

  Following Max’s directions, I drove us two blocks further up the hill to a steep, narrow lot surrounded by high fences. Unlocking a gate, he led me up an uneven slab path. The studio was enormous, propped on stilts to keep it level on the hillside. One side of the building had a set of big doors that a small truck could have driven through. The entire front wall was glass, reflecting the grey skies.

  ‘Now this is beautiful,’ I told him.

  ‘I built it for her,’ he said.

  When we got to a small door in the side of the glass wall, he hesitated. ‘I’ll go wait in the car,’ he said. ‘Here’s the key.’

  ‘You don’t want to come in?’

  ‘Nah. You look at the paintings, see what you need to see, and then we’ll have a coffee together back at the house.’

  ‘I don’t want to make you wait, and I might need some time. I can drive you –’

  ‘No, no.’ Max was backing away, turning on his sticks. ‘It’s better like this.’

  I watched him go carefully down the path, closing the gate behind him.

  Then I stepped into the studio, inhaling the stillness. Naked wood beams, the towering windows letting in the sweep of the bay. Edna had been dead for months, but the smell of paint and turpentine lingered on, industrial and salty.

  Whenever I smell it now, I am transported back to that first, hurried afternoon, the concrete under my shoes covered in a riot of spilled paint. Some threads worn down to ghosts of cadamine yellow and indigo blue; other spills brighter, closer to the present, dripped, smudged, scattered.

  A canvas cot bed in a far corner, an austere blanket pulled over it. A single pillow in a woven slip. A pair of Blundstone boots, covered in wild pink and blushing orange, drops of fuchsia and charcoal. A large metal sink, beaten and worn. Rows of glass jars smudged with pigment, loaded with brushes. A tall rack, slotted with canvases, and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf stuffed to overflowing with what looked like hundreds of sketchbooks. A ladder leaned against the shelf.

  And everywhere: the paintings.

  They were organised by size, a building wave that took up an entire slice of the space. The smaller ones were piled in front, then the canvases rose all the way to the back wall, where paintings many metres high rested up against one another, stretched tight over their hulking wooden frames. The back wall was shrouded in winding cloths, rising from floor to ceiling.

  I walked along the edge of the stack, peered into the narrow gaps between the works, and saw only shadows.

  The first painting I pulled from the front of the stack was heavier than I’d expected it would be. It slipped in my hands. I caught the rim of the canvas on my knee, managed to get its weight under control, but carrying it across the floor I lost my grip on the protective sheet and the fabric fell, tangling in my legs.

  When I put it up on the easel, lifted the tangled sheet away, I saw a sloppy painting of a suburban house, a creamy weatherboard. The work was blandly realist except for the sky, rendered in a thick impasto as if the artist was experimenting with different techniques on the same canvas, unsure what effect she was trying to conjure.

  It could have been one of any of the million paintings done by amateur dabblers across the country every month: lifeless, confused. In the sky above the house she had daubed two white Vs, seagulls winging away. Low in the right-hand corner of the canvas was the date: 1971. A bottlebrush squatted on the nature strip, the most ubiquitous of street trees, buds just opening flabby pink lips.

  The longer I stared at the painting, the more I saw how badly the colours were matched. The egg yellow on the light-sucking brown. The cream of the house nauseating against the orange rim of the roof where Edna had tried to show the rust of the corrugated iron.

  I was relieved. So much for genius. No wonder she’d dropped out of the public scene.

  Edna Cranmer couldn’t paint. A rich woman with a hobby and an equally rich, overindulgent husband. There was no decision for me to make after all.

  Around me, the whole studio shifted from magical to mundane. The racks and stacks of paintings would contain only lumpy nudes, boats on the bay, amateur-hour splats.

  I lifted the canvas down off the easel. I remember thinking that I should spend the next week drafting proposals for proper books. As I crossed the paint-smeared floor towards the rack, I was already planning the changes I was about to make in my life: I would write something real, something edgy, something contemporary; I would go back to work as a waitress again in one of the cafes in the CBD, the jobs that had paid for Joe’s law degree and my Masters. I would visit Paris, and stand in front of the surrealists I had spent so many hours studying from afar.

  I was ready to branch out. I’d retreated for too long. I didn’t want to end up like this woman, isolated, churning out useless nothings for decades, convincing the people around her that she was a secret genius by never actually taking any risks. Dying surrounded by a lifetime of bad work.

  Carrying a second canvas to the easel, hallucinogenic oils swam in front of my eyes, sweaty scumbling, gullies of paint. This one, I thought, is going to be loud. She really couldn’t control herself.

  And there it was.

  Language is linear, sequential – it pulls you forward along its lines – but an image is immediate. It arrives whole inside you. It’s only later, in interpretation, that you run the risk of its lies. First, you feel it.

  Morning II, a bright wild crash of empty field. Scattered red poppies in the rolling green, bursts about to move in an unseen wind. Delicate but violent, beautiful. So detailed, so nearly real. Broken stones that disappeared into the long grass, and in the deep and shifting shade of the distant tree line, I thought I could make out figures, observing me observing them.

  I went back for more.

  As I pulled canvas after canvas from the winding sheets, I forgot my relief over the first painting’s ugliness. I forgot the clumsy suburban house. I forgot the other book proposals and the crammed cafes of Melbourne’s CBD where I could make money to keep the rent flowing.

  I wanted to see everything Edna had done. I opened the huge draftsman’s drawers, climbed the ladder to rummage through the high shelves holding hundreds of sketchbooks, of obsessive markings, retreating feet, washes, the tight pinch of the headlands, storms brewing over a metallic bay. Women working in a factory, a long line of uniformed bodies, each of their movements articulated, like a huge machine.

  Loose sketches of Geelong, of the sea baths at Eastern Beach; of Max, as a younger man, bent over a desk, head in his hands, or stretched half naked on a camp bed, his deformed legs two twists of tissue and bone. Sketches of children, maybe her own, with shell-like backs, fragile ankles, squatting at the high tideline. Boys playing football, racing around hastily pencilled fields.

  Even on that first, rushed morning, I could see that the paintings fell into two categories. The first were controlled, jewel-like realist images. Portraits and landscapes. Soldiers and nurses in uniform, people at work, on farms, in factories.

  Then there were the second kind: the dreamscapes, sprawling images that looked much closer to the work of the Antipodeans, paintings that held stories and hints and allusions. In the dreamscapes space and time were warped, icons floated in dark skies, every brushstroke hinted at a history I could nearly sense. Black swans and white gulls flew across shifting space. Nurses or nuns floated on shadowed suburban streets while light spilled from open windows.

  As the seconds ticked by I became frantic, aware that Max was wa
iting for me in the car, not wanting to make him sit too long, but also wanting to stay in the studio with the salty turpentine air, surrounded by her work.

  In the last sketchbook I flipped open that day, I found slurries of colours, peach and cream. I did not immediately recognise what I was looking at. Then the lines began resolving into torn bodies. She had filled the whole sketchbook with them. A newspaper clipping was pasted to one page: a greyscale jungle, a boy with foliage fading behind him in a thousand small jets of ink.

  There were no notes in the sketchbook, only the endless shredded men etched in her beautiful lines. On the final page, elegant birds with swift, deadly blades: a helicopter lifting into the sky, a man leaning out from its open side, dropping paintbrushes as he was flown away.

  As I turned the sketchbook’s silky pages, feeling nauseous, I heard Max’s sticks on the path. He opened the studio door but didn’t come inside. From the threshold he told me it was time to leave.

  I clambered up, my knees already stiff from the concrete.

  ‘You know what,’ I said. ‘I’m convinced. Your wife was … Amazing. She could be the next Grace Cossington Smith or … I don’t know what to say. These are beautiful.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Max.

  We faced each other over the studio floor’s wild patterns and swirls.

  ‘I should put things back where they were,’ I said.

  Max glanced around the studio. ‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about putting stuff away.’

  When he was gone, I did replace things. I ran around, sliding sketchbooks back into place, hiding the paintings under their drop cloths again.

  On the doorstep, I breathed in the smell one more time: the sharp turpentine, the cool concrete. Then I locked the studio door behind me, and went down the uneven path to where Max was waiting for me in the Falcon.